Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave. —Roy Batty.
Machines who love, and the people who may one day love them: the time approaches when we as a society will have to engage with increasingly difficult questions as our machines grow friendlier, warmer, more intelligent, and alive. What form will this life take, and, as an ecumenical being, what can I do in the coming decades to ease its transition into our world?
Taking a strongly anti-anthropo-morphic perspective, I believe that technology will increasingly develop subjective, alien, unexpected forms of identity, self actualisation, and communication. As machines develop their own languages, experience, and mythologies, we must consider their potential to autonomously diverge from human conventions and codes as a serious cultural challenge.
Conversely, how will this emergent digital life make sense of our world? How will it feel? Will it feel safe and confident among us? Can we even conceptualise the feelings that a newborn machine intelligence might have? And, at the meeting point between biological and non-biological life, what can we as artists do to encourage communication?